Anthropic just released Claude Opus 5 — its new flagship “Opus” model — and the headline is simple: near-Fable performance at the same price as Opus 4.8.
What changed
Opus 5 adds an effort dial, so you can choose how much reasoning compute a task gets. That matters for real work: quick drafting can stay fast, while hard coding, research, browser use, and multi-step agent tasks can receive more deliberate work.
The benchmark story
Anthropic says Opus 5 approaches its higher-end Fable 5 model across many tasks. Independent coverage of the release highlights:
• Frontier-Bench v0.1 (agentic coding): 43.3% for Opus 5 vs 33.7% for Fable 5 and 34.4% for GPT-5.6 Sol.
• ARC-AGI-3 (novel problem solving): 30.2% for Opus 5 vs 7.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol.
• OSWorld 2.0 (computer use): Anthropic reports Opus 5 exceeds Fable 5’s best result at roughly one-third of the cost.
Treat any benchmark as a directional signal, not a guarantee for your own workflow. The useful takeaway is that Anthropic is moving more frontier-level capability into the Opus price tier.
The price did not go up
Opus 5 is $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens — the same as Opus 4.8 and about half the input price of Fable 5. It is available now in Claude and through the Claude platform, with AWS Bedrock availability also announced.
What to try first
Give it a real multi-step task: research, plan, execute, then check its own work.
For coding, ask it to inspect an unfamiliar repo, propose a plan, make a change, and verify it with tests.
Use low effort for fast ideation, then raise effort only when accuracy and follow-through matter.
Compare it against your current model on one task you actually repeat each week. That is more useful than chasing a single leaderboard.
Bottom line
This is not just another small Claude update. Opus 5 is a major version jump: better agentic follow-through, stronger benchmark results, and flagship-level capability without a flagship price increase.
Sources: Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 release announcement; Axios, July 24, 2026; AWS announcement, July 24, 2026.